(...)

Much is made early on of Avery's "four fathers." ("Each time my mother remarried she took her new husband's name.") Spencer even includes a helping of an essay Avery wrote for Esquire magazine about his patrilineal predicament, and it somehow contains the phrase "Which brings me to my mother." Elsewhere a graduate student in Russian literature corrects Avery's pronunciation of Nabokov. "Na-bow-kuff," she says. Actually, it is na-BAWK-ov, if the mnemonic the master himself wrote for his Cornell students is any indication. What is worse, Avery updates the favored Christian rhetorical question of "What would Jesus do?" to "What would Dostoyevsky do?" Probably write a better book than this.

The rest at

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/books/review/Bissell-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

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